joflasher | Okay, I'm an art snob

So I hang out at EquineSites alot and one of the normal posters has decided to start offering to do "paintings" of people's pets. Trouble is, all she's doing is running a software filter over their reference pictures, printing it out and charging for it. No, really, go see REMOVED.

Now I'm all for digital art. One of my favorite artists only works in digital. But I have a hard time accepting someone as an artist when all they are doing is spending 10 damn minutes running a watercolor filter over someone's scanned in image and calling it a painting. I have a harder time accepting that they have the gall to charge for this. I mean, jesus, at least change the color scheme or something. People are lining up for her work because they think she's painting these images.

She's not outright lying and saying she is but she's going through all sorts of linquistic hoops to avoid admitting that she's doing it with a software filter. I mean, one poster sent "Nice, photoshop, right?" and her answer was "Nope not Photoshop Kath, it's a commercial painting program. I've never tried Photoshop, does it do painting too? ". To me, this can easily go either way and, taken with her other comments, seems to be deliberately obscure.

Me, I've been keeping out of it. I mean, if people are happy with what they're getting from her, who am I to rain on the parade. But what I really want to do is jump up and down like a 5 year old in a playground yelling "cheater cheater cheater". She's accepting praise and money for a short cut. A really really short cut. This is why digital artist get no respect. You did it on the computer, that's not real art. You have the undo key and besides, you can just run a filter over a picture and, *snap*, art. Its people like this that give digital artist a bad name.

EDIT--Although this is my journal and I can rant how I like, I decided its bad form to post a link to someone else's gallery to point out how bad their art is. I mean, really, Jo, grow up already.